this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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SimpleX Chat (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone,

I have discovered SimpleX Chat (nothing to do with XChat or HexChat, or the favorite letter of some dumb billionaire), and it appears being a legit good effort at providing good privacy while retaining "mainstream" usability.

And it has been audited (by one company so far, it seems).

The only concern I have is with regards to battery life (given that it has to maintain roughly as many open connections as you have contacts, AFAICT).

Has anyone here used it? Any opinion?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, thanks for taking the time to answer me, in turn!

Also thanks for telling me about the Desktop GUI, I was searching for one and didn't find it. So I'll look again.

Mind you, this is very recent and it's in the releases page of their GitHub under a pre-release. It's in the assets of the 5.3-beta release, which, now that I've checked, has packaging for MacOS, Ubuntu and AppImage. They're the ones with the *-desktop affix.

Now, concerning the absence of identifiers, the marketing material clearly mentions "[not] any user identifiers". As I understand it, it still has identifiers, but as conversation endpoints, and they are unique to a given conversation. So, yes identifiers, but their meaning is a lot harder to infer than with user identifiers. It kind of is like with using unique cryptocurrency wallets per contact, and making transfer through exchanges, converting between currencies. It is a lot harder to track.

Yes, I think you've done a better job of explaining it than me. It's impossible, to my knowledge, to communicate without any kind of identifier, but their model is a rather ingenious one for people concerned with privacy. Couple that with onion routing, and I feel very safe talking to people on the app.

And as for people adopting the app, it is via people like me and you. I run the operations for around 6-10 people in my immediate surroundings (friends and family), and my recommendations mean a lot to them (it often influences entirely what they get to use). Besides, I also advise people professionally. And, so, assuming we each influence a dozen people on average, they will, in turn, create momentum for their own social circles. That's exactly how gmail gained traction.

You sound more hopeful than I am, lol. But I too hope that technologies such as SimpleX take off, if only because of early adopters such as us.

Edit: also, something that SimpleX does is markdown editing, which is just… 👌

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mind you, this is very recent and it's in the releases page of their GitHub under a pre-release. It's in the assets of the 5.3-beta release, which, now that I've checked, has packaging for MacOS, Ubuntu and AppImage. They're the ones with the *-desktop affix.

Great info, thank you!!

Yes, I think you've done a better job of explaining it than me. It's impossible, to my knowledge, to communicate without any kind of identifier, but their model is a rather ingenious one for people concerned with privacy. Couple that with onion routing, and I feel very safe talking to people on the app.

First, 🙏

Second, if you generate an entirely new key for every next message, appending it at the end of the current message, while merely depositing the message at a known place (deaddrop), while using tor (or similar), there is literally no way to link two messages without decrypting the first. That would forego any kind of identifier, but if a single message gets lost, communication entirely breaks. So, I'm no a cryptography expert, but I believe there are ways to do a similar design (mitigating the shortcomings), and eliminate identifiers entirely.

You sound more hopeful than I am, lol. But I too hope that technologies such as SimpleX take off, if only because of early adopters such as us.

Yes, maybe, but also, a sudden swing in userbase can happen, look at Reddit and Lemmy. So it is important to have good, usable software (at least moderately) ready to kick in with a sudden increase in adoption (modulo server loads, this can usually be solved with more servers). And that is IMHO where our most important role is: bringing normies to the group, getting their feedback, and relaying that feedback upstream. So that when the user rush happens, the app/platform isn't immediately cancelling the movement due to inaccessibility/poor UX.

Edit: also, something that SimpleX does is markdown editing, which is just… 👌

Yes, it is quite essential, I agree there too. Signal has formatting, but you need to use the UI to set it, and that just doesn't feel as right...